Archive for ios

Having a page where users insert their credit card numbers? a page containing sensitive data such as personal or business information? you should be aware of the fact that when the user presses the iphone’s home button, and your application performs backgrounding, iOS takes a snapshot of the current page and stores it insecurely on the device. Why? to create an “animation” when the application shrinks into the background and when selected, expands back to your screen. If the last page contained sensitive information, this information could be stolen. Violation of the user’s privacy and business information leakage are just two of the security impacts it may cause.

This is how its done:
1. The user launches your app, and goes to a page containing sensitive information.
2. The user receives a call, or decided himself to press the home button, and send your app into the background.
3. iOS takes a snapshot of the last pages, for animation… this is how it looks:

Now, lets take a look at the application folder on the device. We’ll go to:{YOUR_APP_UUID}/Library/Caches/Snapshots/ and there we can see the file:UIApplicationAutomaticSnapshotDefault-Portrait@2x.png. Opening it, will reveal all the data that appeared on the last page visited in our app, before going into background.

What can we do about it?

Well… I’m glad you asked! There are a few ways to deal with this issue. Here,I will explain four of them:

2. Mark sensitive fields as hidden

The iOS Application Programming Guide states “When your applicationDidEnterBackground: method returns, the system takes a picture of your app’s user interface and uses the resulting image for transition animations. If any views in your interface contain sensitive information, you should hide or modify those views before theapplicationDidEnterBackground: method returns.”

Choose a background that will be saved on top of the original snapshot. You can use the general theme of your application. For example:

4. Prevent Backgrounding

You can also prevent backgrounding completely, instead of trying to hide the sensitive data. To do so, set the “Application does not run in background” property in the application’s Info.plist file. This will add theUIApplicationExitsOnSuspend key to the plist. After setting this property, every time the application tries to go into backgrouding, the inapplicationWillTerminate: is being called and prevents the screenshot from being taken at all.

Summary

Sensitive data, such as Personal Information, Financial or business data, and more can be saved when an app moves to the background without the user’s knowledge. If a malicious application is installed on the same device, or if someone gets a hold of the device, even just for few minutes, This sensitive information could be easily stolen. This snapshot will remain there until a new snapshot of the same application will be taken! This is a series security issue and it needs to be mitigated by the developers. I’ve seen different apps using different solutions… just pick one of the methods I stated above and protect your users.